Random speculation is thoughtcrime, Citizen. Thoughtcrime is treason. Report to the nearest termination booth immediately. Have a nice day.

In 2150, SHODAN attacked the UNN, which was being administered by another AI. Note how rapidly weapons break down in System Shock; they are almost as reliable as the equipment produced in Alpha Complex! The move by SHODAN was originally a covert attempt to take over the human government and, over decades, install herself as the goddess of mankind. However, the unknown AI intercepted her plans and responded with digital warfare. The two fought. Eventually, both had so little of their original programing left that they were unable to distinguish each other from each other and merged. This is the reason for Friend Computer's strange behavior and fondness for the FCCC-P.

Part of R&D's labs (under the Service Firm Aperture Science) are administered by a computer sub-system called GLaDOS. Chell (full name Chell-O-KWL-3) is, as her jump suit clearly shows, an orange clearance citizen and a members of the Romantics, or possibly PURGE, sent to steal the Portal Gun and to destroy Friend Computer. This is why GLaDOS is Still Alive; GLaDOS is only a part of the whole that is Friend Computer. Both GLaDOS and Friend Computer have the same attitude toward problems (sending you into a live fire area for androids because the correct path is under repairs is just what Friend Computer would do), and Friend Computer has Chell backed up because Friend Computer has ALL citizens backed up! And Real Food is one of Friend Computer's favorite rewards for loyal troubleshooters.

Therefore, all Paranoia games led by a male GM present a false vision of Friend Computer. Attendance to such a game is treason and punishable by summary execution. Have a nice day.

As one such GM, I always based Friend Computer's way of speaking on that of 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, whose influence on GLaDOS's voice performance is obvious. These games took place before Portal was released, so my question is: should I turn myself in for termination for something that was not treason at that time? Or should I or travel back in time in order to assassinate myself now that it is treason?

Paranoia, the RPG, is anti-Computer propaganda placed in the present day by Commie Mutant Traitors from the future.

Friend Computer's wise and well-thought leadership will provide happiness and fulfillment to everyone except a small number of inevitable malcontents.

Do you DOUBT Friend Computer, citizen?
Doubting Freind Computer is thoughtcrime, Citizen. Thoughtcrime is treason. Report to the nearest termination booth immediately. Have a nice day.

The prime inspiration for Paranoia, the RPG, is the ending of Animal Farm.

At the end of Animal Farm, the animals spying on the meeting between the humans and the pigs can't tell the difference between the two. In Paranoia, anyone who actually compared Friend Computer's economic policies with the economic policies of historic communist states (Soviet Russia in earlier editions, and the pseudocapitalism of China in the current edition) couldn't tell the difference. Coincidence?

Granted, the most famous forms of Gnosticism claim that the Demiurge who created the physical world is a creature of spite and malice whose motive for creating things was just For the Evulz (well, also bolstering its horribly flawed sense of self). However, some forms, and the original understanding of the Demiurge in Plato's time, said that the Demiurge was actually benevolent and well-meaning; it just wasn't omnipotent or omniscient, and so kept making mistakes. Now, mix "dangerous to all around" like the more famous form of the Demiurge, and "benevolent creator", and you get "benevolent creator whose sense of good is horribly distorted by insanity". Sound like anything you know from the Paranoia world?

TV Tropes is in on the "Metagaming is grounds for termination" rule, which may or may not exist, I wouldn't know.

TV Tropes' most common response to traitors who have already been turned in and are certainly not this troper, in response to an attempt to access the hypothetical page on Paranoia: The database hates you right now. The entry might exist or it might not exist. We would clear this mystery up for you, if we could get to the database. We tried to look it up, but the database puked up an error.

TV Tropes is part of a time-traveling project started by The Romantics to collect data from before the Big Whoops.

Of course, this means everyone on TV Tropes is guilty by association for conspiring with a Secret Society, which means we're all guilty of treason and will be due for summary execution by Friend Computer. Gives new meaning to TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life...

There was no "Big Whoops".

Alpha Complex is an experiment by a Post-Singularity civilization to see what would happen if...
Never mind, they're just doing it For the Lulz.

Friend Computer is a TITAN who was in charge of an experimental underground base and was infected with a very weird strain of the Exsurgent virus.

The rest of the system doesn't know and most aren't touching earth with a 10 million foot pole.

Come on, it's got the cyberpunk, conspiracies, player relations, and even coming back as a clone. Only diff is that Eclipse tech usually works since some of humanity isn't living under a cybernetic tyrant.

Not this one. Vaults were known to be built with structural differences depending on the experiment. Vault 11 had a sacrificial chamber, Vault 12's blast doors were deliberately faulty, Vault 106 was fitted with psychoactive drugs in the ventilation system, and Alpha Complex was just goddamn huge.

The Trekkies are behind everything.

They just look harmless.

Bah! It was the Trekkers that designed Alpha Complex as a holding facility for their hated enemies, the Trekkies.

Chris-R from The Room is a Troubleshooter who got inadvertently sent to the past.

Hey, you never know what will happen during an average visit to R&D. He got popped back in time and is stranded there. He dropped the housing sector and clone number from his name to fit in better.

Alpha Complex is the entire United States.

All the complexes were always connected. No one realizes it's just one big system anymore, least of all the Computer(s).

Almost everything wrong is actually the Communists' fault.

The Communists sabotaged Friend Computer to follow their ideology, and Friend Computer knows they sabotaged it. This is why Friend Computer follows the economic policies it does while hating Commies. Also, Commies were against mutants because they did not conform properly.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy